Trade at Australia’s largest container port has soared in October, setting a new monthly Australian record, Port of Melbourne Corporation (PoMC) has announced.
The record container throughput totalled 202,219 TEU1 in October surpassing the previous best month recorded in July this year hich totalled 188,642 TEU.
The strong figures set a new benchmark for Melbourne as the first port in Australia to handle over 200,000 TEU in a single caledar month.
The container throughput for October represents a 10.4 per cent increase on the same month last year and amounts to the Port ofMelbourne handling over 6500 containers on average every day during October.
Commenting on the record monthly figures, PoMC Chief Executive Officer, Stephen Bradford, says the Port of Melbourne is one of Victoria’s great economic assets.
“On these figures we look set to record our seventeenth conecutive year of trade growth,” he says.
“This reinforces the need for the delivery of the Channel Deepening Project.
“To put this figure in perspective and illustrate our relative strength as a port, Melbourne has handled more containers in a single month than Adelaide handles in an entire year,” Bradford says.
Having set a new milestone earlier this year as the first port in Australia to handle 2 million TEU in a twelve month period, the total number of containers handled by the port in the twelve months to the end of October 2007 is now at 2 .153 million TE.
Notes
1. TEU = Twenty-foot equivalent unit, the standard international measure for container volumes.
2. The Port of Melbourne is the largest container and general cargo port in Australia, handling around 38% of the nation’s container trade.